Alex Miller is one of Australia’s most distinguished writers. He is the author of 14 novels and the winner of many literary prizes, including two Miles Franklin awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, though he has never gained the high public profile of, for example, Tom Keneally or Kate Grenville.His latest book, Journey to the End of Time, is a collection of stories, essays, memoirs and poems that explore the connections between Miller’s art and his life. It has been beautifully curated by his wife Stephanie Miller to bring out some of the sources of his inspiration, his creative process and his artistic values. Fittingly, the title essay recalls the first encounter between Alex and Stephanie (it seems right to use first names in this instance). Love, family and friendship are recurrent themes throughout the book.Review: Journey to the End of Time: Writing and Memoir, Artists and Friends – Alex Miller (Allen & Unwin)Two earlier collections, The Simplest Words: A Storyteller’s Journey (2015) and A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World (2023), offered different perspectives on Miller’s life and how it has fed into his writing. The first included excerpts from his novels, along with discussions of their origins. The second drew on diaries and letters to provide a private account of the long search for his material and the quest to become a published writer.In Journey to the End of Time, childhood memory and adult friendships form running threads. This autobiographical focus is uniquely combined with Miller’s mature reflections on the transformation of life experience into art, and the interaction of reality, imagination and craft that may yield deeper, personal truths.The book is divided into five parts: Writing and Memoir, Writers and Storytellers, Art and Artists, Fiction, and Poetry. Each is an integral component of a structurally balanced whole. The deeply moving episodes of memoir, which open the volume, are matched in the final sections with avowedly fictional stories involving Miller and some friends, which further explore issues arising out of his life. Meanwhile, in the middle sections of the book, ideas about memory and history, and the power of narrative and images, are elaborated in a group of essays and reviews of other writers and artists, including Jacob Rosenberg, Janine Burke, Rick Amor, John Wolseley and Sarah Ormonde. These provide a reflective accompaniment for the stories that follow.Empathetic imaginationMiller published his first novels in the 1980s, the heyday of playful and labyrinthine fictions that flaunted their fictionality, of “beautiful lies” and radical experiments with narrative form. Yet, as he explains in the essay Dreams and Illusions, Miller was drawn to an earlier form of storytelling that created its effects through a “direct simplicity of style”. Works by Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Anton Chekhov and others modelled the possibilities of this approach. Such a style places a premium on clarity, but also relies on implication, leaving readers room to “exercise their own imagination”, thereby investing in the fictional world. Miller explains this approach in an author’s note to his early novel, The Tivington Nott:As a novelist, I have not been so much a liar as a rearranger of facts. That is the kind of writer I am. The purely imaginary has never interested me as much as the actualities of our daily lives, and it is of these that I have written.He goes on to record that many of the events and characters in his novels are drawn from his life or the lives of people he has known. This practice developed out of a suggestion from his friend, the Holocaust survivor Max Blatt, when Miller was a young man struggling to find his material: “Why don’t you write about something you love?” The next essay, John Masefield’s Attic, reveals that the novelist does much more than rearrange the facts. In this “personal meander”, Miller emphasises the importance of the imagination and emotion in the discovery of authentic material, and in the shaping of that material. He concurs with T.S. Eliot and Sidney Nolan that the narrative imagination works best when it is rooted in reality. Drawing ideas from both the realist and romantic traditions of storytelling, Miller concludes that creativity – “the gift of story” – is finally mysterious.One of Miller’s strengths as a novelist is his creation of complex, believable characters, often inspired by friends. In this and earlier collections, he pays tribute to the originals of leading figures in The Ancestor Game, Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell, Autumn Laing, and other works. Such characterisation depends on an empathetic imagination, the ability to put oneself in another’s situation, and a commitment to truthful presentation. Another essay, You Could Have Been There (Unmasking the Fictional Voice), highlights the discovery of a character’s distinctive voice as the foundational stage in the writing of a novel. As an imaginative issue, not just a matter of technique, voice is about the creation of a credible witness within the story. Getting this right is part of the responsibility Miller feels to the friends who have given him the story.This approach to the novel has enabled him to explore significant moral and political issues in complex and sensitive ways. I am thinking here of intercultural relations and the experience of migration in The Ancestor Game, lost stories of women in Conditions of Faith and Autumn Laing, and the legacy of past violence for racial justice today in Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell. Landscapes and peopleHaving grown up in a housing estate in London and migrated to Australia as a young man, Miller is an acute observer of place, in both the social and the geographical sense. In A Sense of Place, an essay first published in 2008, he describes an “impulse” to migrate that he shares with many writers and artists, and his countervailing attraction to Australia, the one place he calls home. One of the short stories in the volume, The Lady of the Pen, offers an ironic treatment of these issues. Two essays on Miller’s long-term places of residence, Port Melbourne and Castlemaine, deftly connect his family experiences to social change within these communities. Urban landscapes in Paris, Berlin and London are vividly presented in other essays. Inside Buckingham Palace offers a unique and nuanced perspective on the country of his birth.Writers and artists have clearly proved an important community. Miller regularly quotes the words of his peers and exemplars; the texts in Journey to the End of Time include reviews of other authors’ books, speeches from book launches or gallery openings, and essays in exhibition catalogues. These pieces are uniformly attentive and informative responses to a wide variety of work. They possess the qualities Miller extols in The Ancestor Game: “an ardent desire to share understanding, to bring lucidly before the reader certain precious results of a search for knowledge”. Two essays on the painter Rick Amor, one subtitled The Poetry of What is Seen, and the other discussing his self-portraits, speak to Miller’s interest in art as a subject for fiction. Sitting for a portrait by Amor inspired Miller’s wonderful novel The Sitters and these essays identify a revelatory quality in Amor’s paintings. Miller wrote the catalogue essay for Sanctuary and Other Island Fables, a joint exhibition by Lyndell Brown, Charles Green and Patrick Pound, artists who became models for characters in his 2005 novel Prochownik’s Dream. The exhibition leads Miller to produce a searching critique of the Western “passion to know” and its effects on nature and human beings. Calmly reasoned questioning of national policy or sentiment features in several of these pieces. Portrait of Sidney Nolan (c.1940) – Albert Tucker, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Sidney Nolan, whose images of the outback first inspired Miller’s interest in Australia, is valued as “one of the few non-Indigenous Australian artists to have established a style uniquely his own”. He is a reference point in several essays across this collection.Journey to the End of Time is a celebration of all forms of love – romantic love, friendship, parental and filial attachment, compassion for others. In Old Age, Love and Death, Miller acknowledges a darker side to these gifts, notably “the torment of love” and the death of old friends. While this essay inevitably has an elegiac tone, it also insists that friends who have “passed on to dwell in the spirit world remain within us”. The final work in Journey to the End of Time, titled On Writing, is a free-verse coda, bringing together the book’s many themes. In it, Miller speaks of writing asa migration away from the familiar into an unknownthat will become my familiarThe ethos that shines through this remarkable collection is, to quote Simone de Beauvoir, one of “devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, […] and to intellectual and creative work”. I strongly recommend it.Kieran Dolin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.